Wired has an interesting article about Hiroshi Ishiguro, a Japanese researcher who has built a remote-control robotic version of himself:

Ishiguro's silicone-and-steel doppelgänger was made from casts taken from his own body. Powered by pressurized air and small actuators, it runs on semiautonomous motion programs. It blinks and fidgets in its seat, moving its foot up and down restlessly, its shoulders rising gently as though it were breathing. These micromovements are so convincing that it's hard to believe this is a machine -- it seems more like a man wearing a rubber mask. But a living, breathing man.

Ishiguro says that he built the robot so that he could "robot in" to his classes instead of having to endure a long commute. During college I actually had a recurring fantasy about doing exactly this, since I would routinely oversleep and miss classes. So I imagine in the future, if Ishiguro's idea becomes popular, there could be entire classes filled entirely with remote-control robots. Though if everyone in the classroom were a robot, it would kind of defeat the purpose. You might as well just have a tele-conference. (Thanks, Kathy!)

Well what I meant was, if he could make every other part of it look realistic, I would think he would be able to make the face look a little more realistic. I would think if he could make it appear as if it was breathing, he would be able to make it look as if it wasn't wearing a rubber mask.

Posted by Archibold on Sat Jul 22, 2006 at 01:16 PM

To answer Archibold's question, the human face is a lot more complicated to emulate than larger body movements, more expensive too.
It'd take dozens of tiny solenoids and actuators to faithfully mimic every facial movement.

Here's some videos from the site that show "robo-profesor" in action. Doesn't really look that realistic to me though: